Interoception & Mental Illness - Brain Entanglements - Organoid Unease - Rising Stars

[Breedlove, S]

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/interoception-is-our-sixth-sense-and-it-may-be-key-to-mental-health/

Distorted Mind-Body Connection May Explain Common Mental Illnesses

By Diana Kwon edited by Jeanna Bryner

By the time Maggie May, an Arkansas resident in her 30s, was admitted to a psychiatric clinic in 2024, she had been struggling for years with atypical anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder that leads to severe food restriction and profound disturbances in body image. (Her name has been changed for privacy.) She had already tried traditional interventions with a psychotherapist and a dietitian, but they had failed to improve her condition. So when May heard about a trial of a new and unconventional therapy, she jumped at the opportunity.

The treatment was unusual in that alongside talk therapy, May underwent several sessions in a sensory-deprivation chamber: a dark, soundproof room where she floated in a shallow pool of water heated to match the temperature of her skin and saturated with Epsom salts to make her more buoyant. The goal was to blunt May’s external senses, enabling her to feel from within—focusing on the steady thudding of her heart, the gentle flow of air in and out of her lungs, and other internal bodily signals.

The ability to connect with the body’s inner signals is called interoception. Some people are better at it than others, and one’s aptitude for it may change. Life events can also bolster or damage a person’s interoceptive skills. Sahib Khalsa, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues think a disrupted interoception system might be one of the driving forces behind anorexia nervosa. So they decided to repurpose a decades-old therapy called flotation-REST (for “reduced environmental stimulation therapy”) and launched a trial with it in 2018. They hypothesized that in people with anorexia and some other disorders, an underreliance on internal signals may lead to an overreliance on external ones, such as how one looks in the mirror, that ultimately causes distorted body image, one of the key factors underlying these conditions. “When they’re in the float environment, they experience internal signals more strongly,” Khalsa says. “And having that experience may then confer a different understanding of the brain-body relationship that they have.”

© 2025 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, 
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https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-human-brain-is-like-a-murmuration-of-starlings

The entangled brain

Luiz Pessoa

When thousands of starlings swoop and swirl in the evening sky, creating patterns called murmurations, no single bird is choreographing this aerial ballet. Each bird follows simple rules of interaction with its closest neighbours, yet out of these local interactions emerges a complex, coordinated dance that can respond swiftly to predators and environmental changes. This same principle of emergence – where sophisticated behaviours arise not from central control but from the interactions themselves – appears across nature and human society.

Consider how market prices emerge from countless individual trading decisions, none of which alone contains the ‘right’ price. Each trader acts on partial information and personal strategies, yet their collective interaction produces a dynamic system that integrates information from across the globe. Human language evolves through a similar process of emergence. No individual or committee decides that ‘LOL’ should enter common usage or that the meaning of ‘cool’ should expand beyond temperature (even in French-speaking countries). Instead, these changes result from millions of daily linguistic interactions, with new patterns of speech bubbling up from the collective behaviour of speakers.

These examples highlight a key characteristic of highly interconnected systems: the rich interplay of constituent parts generates properties that defy reductive analysis. This principle of emergence, evident across seemingly unrelated fields, provides a powerful lens for examining one of our era’s most elusive mysteries: how the brain works.

The core idea of emergence inspired me to develop the concept I call the entangled brain: the need to understand the brain as an interactionally complex system where functions emerge from distributed, overlapping networks of regions rather than being localised to specific areas. Though the framework described here is still a minority view in neuroscience, we’re witnessing a gradual paradigm transition (rather than a revolution), with increasing numbers of researchers acknowledging the limitations of more traditional ways of thinking.

© Aeon Media Group Ltd. 2012-2026. 
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https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2026/01/02/nx-s1-5658576/brain-organoids-research-ethics

Brain organoids are helping researchers, but their use also creates unease

Jon Hamilton

Research on conditions like autism, schizophrenia and even brain cancer increasingly relies on clusters of human cells called brain organoids.

These pea-size bits of neural tissue model aspects of human brain development as they grow for months and even years in a lab. They also make many people uneasy, in part because the brain is so closely tied to our sense of self.

A group of scientists, ethicists, patient advocates and journalists met for two days in Northern California this fall to discuss how scientists, and society, should proceed.

Among the questions:

    Is it okay to place human organoids in an animal's brain?
    Can organoids feel pain?
    Can they become conscious?
    Who, if anyone, should regulate this research?

"We are talking about an organ that is at the seat of human consciousness. It's the seat of personality and who we are," says Insoo Hyun, a bioethicist at the Museum of Science, Boston, who attended the meeting.

"So it's reasonable to be especially careful with the kind of experiments we're doing," he says.
Societal issues by the sea

The event was hosted by Dr. Sergiu Pașca, a prominent organoid researcher whose lab at Stanford University used the technology to develop a potential treatment for a rare cause of autism and epilepsy.

    © 2026 npr


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https://www.thetransmitter.org/science-and-society/neurosciences-leaders-legacies-and-rising-stars-of-2025/

Neuroscience’s leaders, legacies and rising stars of 2025.

By The Transmitter

The neuroscience field is fueled by its people. Check out The Transmitter’s stories from the past year about some of the scientists driving neuroscience forward, including one investigating prosocial behavior in rodents, and another recording—for the first time—individual neural signals in bats in the wild. And explore our remembrances for neuroscientists lost in 2025, such as a trailblazer in the memory field and a leader in the neural basis for hearing. Take a look at a growing challenge to the neuroscientist pipeline, and the work of two determined collaborators who shattered the perception that the octopus brain can’t be studied. Finally, we recognize some of the brightest young talents the field has to offer.

© 2026 Simons Foundation
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